strap line

Wednesday, 23 August 2017

Opening lines - and pinching stuff from Shakespeare.

Whole seminars are taught at
conferences and writing courses on opening lines. They matter. An intriguing or
memorable opening line can grab a potential reader and make them want to read
the book.

No pressure then.

An opening line might come to you
out of the blue. I have a cracker – actually not an opening line, but the
closing line of an opening paragraph that I think is intriguing enough to be
workable. Problem is, it has no book attached to it and I’m not sure that it
ever will. Most openers have to be
laboured over, or at least kicked about until they pass muster. The big writing
tip on that one is to write the first line after
you’ve written the whole book. Unless you’ve got that cracker lined up
already, put something in place that is good enough to set the tone and come
back to it. Jumping into a new book can be hard – all that blank paper waiting
to be filled – it doesn’t need to be made worse because you can’t get the first
ten or so words just right before you begin.

I don't think so.

And where can you go for help? Well, there are those courses and seminars,
but there’s always the option of looking at what other people have done. I’m a
fan of the theatre, so I find plays quite inspiring and if you’re looking there, then you might as well go right to the top and consider Shakespeare. An interesting number of the plays begin in
the middle of a conversation – sometimes a quarrel, or a moment where action is
moving from one point to another. The Comedy of Errors begins with someone
being sentenced to death, which is pretty dramatic. Often these conversations are between minor
characters, talking about the main protagonists, building up to the big
entrance for the star of the show. That one can get you into trouble though, as
readers can get invested in the wrong people, thinking the story is about them.
I’ve fallen foul of that one a number of times.

But the idea of beginning in the
middle of something – where the action has already started taking place ‘off
stage’ might just be something to get the thing going. What’s the point that is
going to launch this story into its orbit? What are the essentials that the
reader needs to know? How dramatically can that be conveyed? Is there a
sentence that can sum that up? Can you
get the reader into the action and drip feed the back story in later? All ideas
to play with.